Surgeons have traditionally used scalpels for a variety of surgical procedures to cut or excise tissue. Surgical precision requires, in certain types of procedures, the angle of orientation of the scalpel blade to be of particular importance.
For example, each year many people have skin growths, such as moles, removed. In order to excise the mole the surgeon must use a scalpel to make two mirror image incisions in the skin around the mole. Depending on the “handedness” of the surgeon one incision is more difficult to make than the other. This is due to the traditional flat handle design used for most scalpels, which makes it much harder to hold the blade in the proper fashion. The flat handle requires the surgeon's wrist to roll more for one incision versus the other, thus increasing the chance of a minor hand tremor or misalignment of the blade relative to the surgical site while cutting. This in turn, reduces the precision with which minor image symmetry can be created.
Thus, there is an ongoing need for improvements in scalpel design to facilitate greater ease in surgical applications.